Monday, June 4, 2001

‘Twas very productive today, despite early yearnings otherwise.

I started out with devotions on my deck, then I worked my way through two chapters of Jan Karon’s At Home in Mitford. I had trouble motivating myself afterrwards, though. I just didn’t want to do anything. So, I made a list of the things I wanted to do today:

1. Do the trash
2. Get perlite. What’s perlite? It’s a soil additive; I’d heard of a guy who kept potted plants in a mixture of peat moss and perlite.
3. Plant the stuff I bought yesterday, in their pots (this is why I’d bought the perlite)
4. Paint my computer case
5. Catch up on this diary

The trash was done quickly enough. I then climbed into my pickup truck and drove to the post office, cancelling the hold on our mail and collecting the mail that had built up at my P.O. box (including an eBay purchase that had come through). I ran across the road to a hardware store in search of perlite; they had none, so I re-crossed the street and drove back to the nursery we visited yesterday, where I bought a bag of perlite and a little stone tortoise.

I had everything I needed for the pots, so I put my plants in those and hauled them up to the top of the wall. Lovely!

I did get into a brief argument with Dad, though. He’d made an off-hand remark to me during lunch which was meant to be kind but happened to probe a sensitive spot. After giving myself some time to cool down and figure out what to say, I went inside and apologized, explaining the situation. We patched it up immediately.

I then considered my options for painting my computer case. I was originally going to paint Pendragon blue and Lady the gunmetal grey, but after thinking about it I realized that Pendragon would look a lot better in the gunmetal grey. Plus, the gunmetal spray doesn’t require a primer, so I decided I’d try to do a very quick job on Pendragon.

So, I pulled the case off of Pendragon, disassembled the faceplate, and put all of that out on newspapers in the garage. Two coats of gunmetal grey spray paint later, and I brought them back inside and re-assembled them. I didn’t even spray it with a clear finish. But boy, it looks fantastic.

I’ll paint Lady with the blue spray paint that I bought.

After dinner, I wrote a diary entry for Thursday, and had Mom read it over. She seemed vaguely uneasy about it, but didn’t have any specific problems with it, and said that I could post what I’d written. So, after making sure she didn’t mind, I posted that entry. I’ll be filling out those entries over the course of the week.

In the evening, I messed around with SUB, writing a script to create a .zip archive of all the tutorials. In doing so, I managed to delete all of the User tutorials. And I didn’t have a backup yet. Arrrrg.

So, I posted a long message on the AtheOS developer mailing list, asking people to send me any cached copies of AtheDocs they might have lying around. I also talked about the current state of Kamidake, as well as my plans to shift my AtheOS development focus from end-user apps like Clio to development tools like B2A (a BeOS-to-AtheOS source code converter).